Sao Paulo’s ‘Big Worm,’ an elevated highway, must go, urban planners say
SAO PAULO — It’s called the Big Worm — a 2.2 mile-long elevated highway that wiggles through the center of South America’s largest city, curving beside bedroom windows of once-elegant art deco buildings and carrying 80,000 noisy vehicles through a wide swath of cityscape each day.
Urban planners say that the 40-year-old concrete monster has no place in Sao Paulo and that flattening it should be on the city’s to-do list if this sprawling metropolis is to modernize. This city, Brazil’s economic heart, has to revamp the kind of out-of-date infrastructure embodied by the Worm, those planners say, if Brazil is to maintain the strong growth that has transformed the economy into one of the world’s most vibrant.
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Cutting through the middle of Sao Paulo, Brazil, is a 2.2-mile-long elevated highway built to ease the city's growing traffic concerns. Today, many argue the highway should be taken down and replaced by underground tunnels and subway systems.
“Demolish it!” said Pedro Taddei Neto, an architect and urban planning expert from the University of Sao Paulo. “The developed world is demolishing structures like this. We have to follow their lead.”
At a recent conference on Sao Paulo’s future, urban planners from New York, Singapore, Barcelona and China told their Brazilian counterparts that the city needs a makeover. That means expanding the subway, carving out underground highways, adding parks, revamping airports and razing elevated highways such as the Worm.
“There is a great urban diamond to discover, to develop,” said Alfonso Vegara, among the designers of modern Barcelona. But he cautioned: Such a complex and expensive undertaking would not be easy in a metropolitan area of 3,000 square miles.
The only way to succeed, said Robert Yaro of New York’s Regional Plan Association, is to think big and stay the course, for decades if needed. “This is not for the impatient,” he counseled.
Sao Paulo planners nodded in agreement — and it is easy to see why.
This may be a cosmopolitan, vibrant, rich city, as demonstrated by its thousands of skyscrapers and the helicopters ferrying executives across town. But it is also a mess. A thousand new cars are introduced to traffic-choked streets each day. The subway system has roughly 60 stations and 50 miles of track; New York’s has 468 stations and more than 800 miles of track. Business travelers rate Sao Paulo’s international airport the worst on the continent.
A race to build big
Like mega-cities the world over, Sao Paulo became a victim of poor planning and its own success. Its population has soared from barely 2 million in 1950 to nearly 11 million today, as the city and its industrial suburbs became the manufacturing center of a largely urbanized country. About 20 million people live in the metropolitan area.
In a race to build big and build fast, Sao Paulo paved over parks and built highways now considered poorly conceived. That included the Presidente Artur da Costa e Silva elevated highway, which soon became known as the Minhocao, a giant mythical worm that was said to inhabit the jungle and swallow up whatever it came across.
The Worm immediately provided an important corridor for traffic once it was completed in 1971. It also carved across venerable Avenida Sao Joao, a once-stylish thoroughfare that had been lined with parks, cafes and landmark apartment houses.
